Those Willing to Drown | Beiguang x GN! Reader

ARC III-ACT III

Your anxiety was not something new that had developed through the heart racing trauma that was escaping the corrupt government of Snezhnaya, and it's little, even more corrupt, organisation - the fatui.

No, actually, your anxiety came from a much more complicated, deep rooted seed that would take a long look at your childhood to understand.

Your mother was a missing woman ever since you could remember, your father having done everything within his power to find her and return her to the place she knew as home.

It was unexpected, her return, and almost unexplainable. One day the officials just received a phone call from a woman claiming to have been the missing person of an unsolved ten year case. Ten years. When she returned, you were well going into your teenage years as a motherless child.

It's not to say you didn't love her, you did! You just didn't know how to express that love to a person who had sadly never been in your life. That, and every time you stepped within arms length of her you couldn't help the suffocating fear that would unexplainably overcome you. Traveling down your spine and through your heart, locking your fingers in place and freezing your feet on the spot - all until it reached down to tap the tips of your fingers and toes. Completely drowned in paranoia.

Your mother had mentioned something to you once she had returned, once she deemed you old enough to understand the context of her words. She said; "I will not go out of my way to love something that doesn't love me back. I've spent enough years in captivity to sit here still."

At the time you didn't understand, she was a woman you never met before suddenly coming into your life claiming she loved you and wished for you two to have the relationship you never formed with her. However growing up without her breathing down your neck, what she was saying was that she would not waste another second of her life chasing relationships that the other person didn't want to form. Not after spending that long with her freedom stripped away from her.

It made sense, but you were a child. A child was suddenly supposed to act fine and trusting to a person they've never met?

Your father, in comparison to the person your mother was, was a happy, warm man. When he wasn't spending his days away working or (previously) looking for your mother, he made sure to sacrifice each one of his waking seconds for you. He was the only sense of stability you had in your life - he was your teacher, your best friend, your hero.

Being homeschool, he made sure to try his absolute hardest to fill in all the positions you couldn't have due to learning at home.

He played with you, spent hours revising your subjects with you and still made sure to keep your house standing.

It wasn't until you met Melina that you started seeing through the cracks of your father, and perhaps that's where it began; your anxieties, paranoia and distrust in the world.

Melina had met you on accident, and it was a very humorous situation now that you think back on it. With your father gone off to work for the day and the house being filled to the brim with silent awkward tension between you and your mother, a young teen you decided that getting out to take a stroll around a nearby park would be good for your health.

Melina was at the park when you first arrived, and it would be a lie to say you weren't immediately drawn towards her. She was a short teen, shorter than most from what you had seen. She had fluffy, curly orange hair and light brown eyes that stood out with her long eyelashes. When you first saw her she was riding a bicycle around the lawn, laughing and cheering as another friend of hers chased her around on their own bike.

You two only became friends because she bumped into you with her bike during your little walk - crashing into your back because the breaks had faulted.